Michael sounds stressed in this letter. And why wouldn’t he be, with a wedding, a new home, and his father’s death waiting for him in the next six months?

Rebecca and I did join him on our Spring Break from Michigan State to go tree planting with him and his crew in southern Indiana. I don’t remember much about it, except that Rebecca was better than I at pulling those white pine seedlings out of the quiver and wedging them into the moist Hoosier earth with the specialized, iron tree-planting tool.